FORT PIERCE, Fla. — Monday is Memorial Day. Wednesday would have been John F. Kennedy's 107th birthday. More than eight decades ago this month, an American tanker ship was torpedoed off the Florida coast, leaving two men dead. Stay with me. There's a connection to all this.
First, the story of the SS Java Arrow, a tanker built just over a century ago by the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corp. It weighed 8,327 tons and carried 1,300 drums of lube oil. It was torpedoed by the German submarine U-333 in the sixth month of American involvement in World War II.
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